For over ten years, Elizabeth Peyton's accomplished drawings and jewel-like paintings, both based on photographs from magazines and books, personal snapshots, or video freeze-frames, have depicted a personal pantheon of rock stars, historical figures, and loved ones; her art is an intimate diary of fandom and friendship. Ignited by the spark of Peyton's devotion—she admits unabashedly to loving many of her subjects—her best works revive the magnetism, often diminished by a camera's lens, of outsize personalities. Using a bright palette, she renders her largely male subjects as delicate butterflies, pinning down their refined features and pallid complexions in precise pencil lines and fairly wide, watery brushstrokes; predominant reds, pinks, and purples hint at the rose-tinted lenses through which she views their doe eyes and tousled hair. Even Richard Nixon, pictured on the television set in a recent drawing of John Kerry, gives off a gamine air. Whether or not they are famous, her subjects are endlessly alluring: Peyton makes you want to befriend them, or, better yet, to become one yourself.

Peyton's drawings, made with colored pencil, watercolor, charcoal or pastel crayons, possess much of the expressive, atmospheric beatification of her paintings. She pays particular attention to her subjects' winsome facial expressions, often sketching clothes and props only perfunctorily and allowing backgrounds to dissolve into the ether. Keith Richards, his chin resting in his hand, is framed by a mountain of black hair in Keith (2004); the shadows cast across his face display subtle variations of color while the chair and table at which he sits are nothing more than quick horizontal and vertical pencil strokes. Likewise, our attention naturally focuses on the tiny daub of bright red marking the interlocking lips in Pete and the Wolfman (from the NME) (2004), a pastel only slightly larger than a sheet of paper.

The balance of self-possession is shifting toward Peyton in her most recent works, as her technical mastery adds kindling to the warmth given off by her subjects—which now include the artist herself. In Maritime (E.P.) (2003), she gives a self-portrait the Elizabeth Peyton treatment, imparting an androgynous glamour to a snapshot of her reading a book (in slim pants and a bubblegum pink t-shirt) at New York's Maritime Hotel. Of her subjects, Peyton has said that she is interested in "the particular moment when they're about to become what they'll become." Along with select contemporaries, Peyton's art has revived and updated a figurative painting tradition—marked by delicacy and embodied by figures ranging from James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent to Gwen John, Kees van Dongen, and David Hockney—considered moribund by proponents of abstraction and newer media alike. With her subtle yet mesmerizing expressions of her subjects' charisma, Peyton has become is our most adept chronicler of shooting stars, cataloging their radiance as it illuminates her private reveries.